The present invention relates to recording application user actions.
Applications are used by computer systems, for example, to process (e.g., sort, filter, store) data. To ensure proper processing of the data, the applications are sometimes tested. In one approach to testing, known inputs are supplied to the application during execution to establish what the predicted proper outputs would be. Using these predicted outputs, another instance of the application running on a possibly different platform and running at any location may be tested by applying the same inputs to the other application and comparing the processed outputs to the predicted outputs. To determine known inputs and predicted outputs that are useful for such testing, applications may be monitored and user inputs and the resulting outputs collected. Once recorded, the user actions may be used as known inputs for testing, for example, updated or new versions of the application. Typically, a test tool is used to record the interactions of a user with an application. User interactions may be recorded by tracking messages generated by and for an operating system, such as Microsoft Windows. Low level messages such as key down, character N, key up, and so on may be considered together as the input by the user of the character N, rather than actually storing all of the low level messages.